Dozens of boys say they were abused in a Christian scouting program

Boys in the Assemblies of God join the Royal Rangers for Bible study and backpacking. But the ministry has also drawn sexual predators, an NBC News investigation found.

This article is part of “Pastors and Prey,” a series investigating sex abuse allegations in the Assemblies of God.

The boys had been taught to obey their elders, and how to pitch tents and build campfires along the creek-lined woods of western Oregon. They could dutifully recite the motto for the Royal Rangers, a Pentecostal version of the Boy Scouts. “Ready for anything,” they chanted in unison.

But no one had prepared them for this: Adults sometimes do bad things to children. And when people in power find out, they don’t always act.

Travis Reger learned that hard lesson around 1984, at age 10. That’s when, he says, a Royal Rangers commander from his Assemblies of God church in Albany, Oregon, fondled him and another boy at a sleepover.

Travis Reger as a child. His Royal Rangers leaders in Oregon were at the center of one of the program’s most disturbing abuse cases in the 1980s.Courtesy Reger familyWhat haunts Reger most is what he says happened after his father confronted the pastor: practically nothing. By the time the Royal Rangers leader was convicted in 1988 of abusing two other children, at least 18 boys said they had been molested by him and a fellow troop leader, according to lawsuits and police records.